This is one of a series of posts in self-promotion. You can read the first one here.

Let me first say that I have very mixed reactions regarding Fan Fiction.

If you are a writer and you are getting fanfic, that means something pretty good is going on. Not only do you have a reader community that loves the same things we love (which is what we all want as writers, to share the things we love.*), but you have them loving your world to the point that they invest their time and creative efforts into adding to it.

On the other hand, these creative types can potentially dilute the vision you have for your characters that you created. Some of the worst offenders were the Mary Sues who were so perfect and wonderful that everyone loved them no matter what. There seemed to also exist a rabid “slash fiction” version written by ill-brained fans who weren’t content with the characters as they were, but had to turn them into something they were not.** There’s even an open-world group (I won’t link them here and give them more traffic than they need) that thinks they should be able to run rough-shod legally over anyone else’s intellectual property because they’re too lazy to worldbuild on their own.

In some ways, I consider a lot of movies made from books to be fanfic. Essentially the scriptwriter and director botches the story elements, and I ask myself, “If they liked it enough to make a movie out of it, how can they change it so drastically? Why not just write a story of your own by plucking out the elements you like and rearranging them?” Of course that argument would only fall on deaf ears, because of course they “know better.” But I digress…

After all of this griping, how can fanfic possible help a writer?

Well, as I mentioned, it means something good is going on with your stories. Many of us admit to being or starting writing fanfic to hone our skills, just like as budding artists we may draw from other people’s drawings to practice until we develop our own style. N0w, you could go after the fanfic writers and demand they take anything down. You can legally chase them down if they are making money from anything they write based on your stories. You could allow them to keep it up as long as they add a disclaimer that their story is not written by the author and is by no means sanctioned or related to the canon of the stories from which they draw the characters and world.

Or… you could require that they add the disclaimer and add a link to your website, so that you get traffic drawn to your sites and make sales from interested readers who want to know what the real characters and world is like. They may prefer yours, they may not, but you can’t shape readers to like you, you can only try to connect with readers who like what you do.

Now, if you’re reading this EA Games / Clive Barker / Developers of Undying–I have an idea for you that I would love to flesh out as a story for a sequel to that amazing game…You know, so it wouldn’t actually be fan fiction, but work from a “published” author…

*If you aren’t writing about things you love then you are writing dreck just to feed your wallet and probably hate what you do so much that you contemplate slitting your wrists at least once a day because in order to keep making money, you have to sell them what they want instead of what you want. And the work suffers for it too–readers can tell when your heart isn’t in it.

**WARNING: Read no further if you want to keep your brain clean. K/S is where the “slash” came from, as in Kirk slash Spock, as in “Kirk and Spock in a homosexual love affair”. The popular Highlander series had the same thing happen to it, where fanfic had the main character – usually the female author vaguely disguised – trying to convince the show’s main characters that they were in fact gay and should be lovers. And that is barely scratching the surface.

This post continues my adventures in Self-Promotion. If you would like to read the first post on the subject, start here.

In case you were wondering, yes. I carry business cards. Some people may ask why, since I don’t provide a service or traditional product where I should need to be contacted directly. “Why not just do book signings?” I’ve been asked. Well, for one, I don’t have physical books on hand to do such. I’ve been researching print-on-demand through companies like Createspace or Lightningsource, but even then, carrying a ton of books around just to sign and hand out or sell isn’t feasible. What is? A business card.

Business cards are tiny. They’re just a sliver of card, they fit easily into a wallet or pocket. I can carry dozens of them at one time, and they don’t weigh me down.

Business cards make any encounter a potential for networking and sales. Never underestimate the power of networking–the person with whom you speak may not read your brand of fiction (or any fiction at all) but know someone who does. They could pass them along.

Business cards can make a sale even when you’re not around. I leave mine on community bulletin boards at work, at the grocery stores, with checks when I dine out.

Business cards can contain all the necessary information in a tiny package. While the front of the card has all the pretty colors and my brand (you know: “I’m In Your Universe, Exposing Your Brain.”), including a personal e-mail address and the address of my “publisher” Overlord M Press, the back is the real workhorse. It has the QR codes for Overlord M Press, and my author pages on Amazon and Smashwords.

Business cards are endlessly customizable. Use a little Google-fu and you can find hundreds of millions of places to get them. I used my own images (although I wasn’t terribly happy with the result, as the dark blue dropped out of the final printing) but overall they came out as I wanted them.

Business cards are cheap. They’re getting less and less expensive as more companies strive to print up a batch of quality-cardstock in order to secure your commerce for their other products.

What other products, you say? Well, T-shirts for one. I had one printed up that has my book cover on front and the aforementioned QR codes on the back. (This may not be an option if you’re paranoid about people following you with your camera, trying to scan the code. You are warned.) For me, my goal is to have a t-shirt for each of my books and novels and to choose the shirt to fit the venue. For example, if my stories about the American Revolution, In the Light of Liberty, were complete and published, I would make a shirt and wear it to the Gunmaker’s Fair I will be attending this weekend. Talk about networking without saying a word!

Don’t overlook the little powerhouse of the business card. You really can make it work for you if you are marketing on a budget.

This is the second post of my Adventures in Self-Promotion. You can read the first post here.

Self-publishing used to be looked on as laughable for two main reasons. One, the author “obviously” couldn’t get their books published via the normal brick & mortar route, so it really wasn’t good enough to read, was it? Two, self-publishing meant enlisting the services of a vanity press and that meant that the author paid huge fees to have their work turned into hardcopy, with very high minimum print runs, and the author was then tasked with selling the books themselves and turning a profit in the process. With the second point, it usually meant they barely cut a profit, selling to friends and family and the occasional stranger if they took it to a book fair or somesuch.

I’d seen a lot of the latter when I worked for a brief stint dealing with the Local Authors at Borders, and much of the work was not pretty, and barely sold. They got ripped off at the vanity press, too, by the look of the reproduction methods.

Now, however, the face of self-publishing is changing. With biggies like Kindle Publishing and Smashwords, authors can get their work out there for minimal costs (nothing for the actual publishing, so maybe just the computer and internet connection, which most of us have anyway). The only problem with that is now there is so much work out there of full-spectrum levels of quality that even the really good stuff is likely to drown in the vast ocean of available reading material.

So how does one stand out?

Fast forward with self-publishing: I used to turn my nose up at the idea of having anyone but myself publish my work. After all, the work was mine and I should realize the most profit from its success, not the pittance that I would get unless I turned out to be another Patterson or Rowling for the publishing company.

So, brick & mortars were out of the question. However… there’s something to be said for magazines, hardcopy and online.

The big point being they generally have a readership. That means that if someone bothers to read my story, and they like it, they may very well search other places for my work. Now, a lot of teachers of self-promotion–for all products, not just books and stories–talk about promoting before the product/service/book is made available by sending out teasers on mailing lists. How does one get these elusive “lists”? Cold-sending is exactly like those annoying cold calls you get from telemarketers. But if someone in a magazine reads my work and then comes to my website, they could not only buy my backlist but also sign up for my newsletter (which I really don’t have in motion just yet, but that’s one of the problems about working for myself, making the time…).

Taking the above in mind, I’ve done searches for online magazines that have rights I can live with. I’d prefer to write “throw-away” stories that have limited interest for me in their expansion (meaning I don’t plan to write any more in that world, in case there are some exclusives and rights-issues that could get in the way) and consider it the cost of doing business. Some of them have fees to submit (Submittable isn’t a free service for them like it is for those creating an account, even if the magazine charges for the submission) and some are free. Many of these are very low, so it is something to consider if you are utterly broke.

The other consideration and the main one for me is the inclusion of the bio. After all, I want them to read more of my work, and if the magazine makes that easier for them to reach my sites where I am promoting my stories and books by including a bio and a link, all the better. I would choose a magazine that had a small fee and published a bio over one that ignored the bio material but was free otherwise.

And for the pay? That’s just icing on the cake. For those who seek inclusion in the SFWA, some of them qualify. I’m not a fan of the organization because of some of their questionable expenditures with the dues, but that’s me.

NOTE: For the sake of not causing a furor over stories I may have submitted and earning even the hint of a bias toward them while they are judging my submissions, I won’t mention where I’ve entered.

If you’ve never heard of the Navy SEALs, you’re either not from America or very likely call that slab of limestone over your head “Home Sweet Home”. I’m not going to explain who they are here, but what I will say is that the perception of them as door-kickers extraordinaire is pervasive. Their entire lives overseas consist of these missions where they make terrorists and pirates snack on lead, and back in the States they party like a bunch of demons, right?

While that last bit about them partying is at least semi-factual, the truth is that they train hard and they spend a lot of time doing all the not-so-“glamorous” aspects of SEAL/Navy life. Physical Training. Duty. Watches. Briefing. Debriefing. Travel. Paperwork. LOTS of paperwork. The “hardcore” parts of the life, sold in the movies and novels, can be boiled down to a nugget in a big barrel of plain ol’ rock. (But they’re still the sexiest men ever, bar none.)(I’m going to get slammed with complaints that I ratted them out as not having a 24-7 highspeed lifestyle, I bet. I know just enough about Navy life to be dangerous, having served as a sailor myself. I just hope they stopped reading at the compliment above, which is not hollow. They’re very hot.)

What does this have to do with self-promotion, you wonder?

Not that I would ever equivocate the life and challenges of someone who trained and attained such an honor as becoming a Navy SEAL to someone who runs their own business, but think for a moment when you hear someone say “I want to be my own boss.” The thoughts, if not spoken, run along the lines of “I don’t have to work for anyone else and I can take time off and go places I want to visit and do things I want to do.” They see the glamorous side without taking into account any of the droll day-to-day activities necessary to reach that goal of working for oneself. What they really want is to be independently wealthy without all the hard work. (Not that I would ever have a problem with being independently wealthy, of course! Isn’t that the plan?)

I have a friend who runs his own business and has been doing so successfully for a very long time. But–huge “but”–it took him 20+ years to get there, and he works insanely long hours. He takes days off–sort of. Often, when I worked with him, we’d be up in the wee-est hours of the morning and would be out on the road or doing the labor of the job (yes, he got his hands very dirty along with his “wrecking crew”) and wouldn’t see a bed until close to midnight. And I thought boot camp hours were tough!

All that is just to explain that working for oneself, like I would love to do as a writer, is a goal that I am trying to achieve and I spend a lot of my time not just writing but by doing all of the rest of the work a publisher would do if I had gone the brick & mortar route. I get to do my own self-promotion, and for the next couple of blogs I am going to discuss the different methods I’ve been trying to get My Brand out there. Here are a few methods I will discuss:

Magazine Submissions

Business Cards

FanFiction (but probably not in the way you’re thinking)

P.S. I’ve been working on a project that I had been calling Dross, but has now come to be known as Ink & Sigil. Barring any emergencies, the novel, a steampunk fantasy, will be out before the end of the year.